Paper Doll (2 page)

“I feel like Mexican food,” he said.

Bean had once confided to Bryant and Lewis that he always kept thirty-five cents in mad money on his person, at all times.

“Mexican food,” Lewis said grimly.

“Lewis doesn't like Mexican food,” Snowberry said.

Lewis bounced something small and light off Bean's head. “You think they'd be swimming that river if the food on their side was good?” he asked.

Whatever Lewis had thrown, Audie had gotten to and was now eating. Audie was one of the base dogs, blind enough that they'd often hear around the base the small-scale collisions and yelps involving the dog and recently moved equipment. When there was major movement going on, the dog stayed in one spot, next to their Nissen hut. A jeep had knocked her sprawling once, and the sound of the engines and brakes had made a lasting impression.

Bean tried to pet her, and she pulled away. Bryant had toyed with the idea upon first seeing her that here, finally, was his own puppy, but she had proven too stubbornly independent for that, disappearing for long stretches even as she seemed to recognize and acknowledge their kindness.

Bryant wondered aloud, gazing at her, when the G variants might come through.

“When they've used up all the F's,” Lewis suggested.

“That's not very funny,” Bean said.

“Shut up,” Lewis said.

Bean apologized. He seemed to feel he was always saying something to irritate people and never knew why, and his method of handling it was to apologize frequently in general, hoping to suggest that he meant well.

Lewis stood and straddled a child's bike he had bought in the village. Or claimed he had bought in the village. He began pedaling in wobbly circles, his knees high and wide on the undersized frame, the front wheel nosing erratically about as he attempted to gain speed. He leaned dramatically over and, picking up velocity, scooped up a deflated Mae West with one hand.

“Where
is
everybody?” he asked. “We're supposed to be taking a picture here. Don't tell me I hosed down for nothing.” He took a swipe with the Mae West at Bobby Bryant as he went by.

“They said they'd be here,” Bryant said.

“You got somewhere to go?” Snowberry asked. Lewis swept past, trying to hook the soft noose of the Mae West collar around his head. He whapped Snowberry in the face.

“Lewis is the kind of guy,” Snowberry said, “it said in the yearbook, ‘Enjoys a good practical joke,' and what they meant was he likes to kick people's teeth out.”

Lewis ran over his hand.

“You know, all you're doing,” Snowberry said, “is making enemies of the very people on who your life may depend.”

“I don't have enemies,” Lewis said. “Though some of my friends could stand watching.”

Snowberry said, “In my mind you're riding in a hole that's getting deeper and deeper.”

Audie could hear the motion and sniffed the air nervously. She stood and stretched and curled deeper behind Snowberry into the tarpaulins.

“What a stupid dog,” Lewis said, and swished the Mae West at her. Her ears curled back. “We get dog stories and blind dogs and every other thing. I'm sick of dogs.”

“I like dogs,” Bean said.

“What do
you
know?” Lewis asked. “I heard you once go ‘Somebody get the door' during a Lionel Hampton solo.”

“Dogs for sale,” Snowberry crooned. “Appetizing young dogs for sale.”

Lewis stopped riding. The rest of the crew was waving them down to
Paper Doll.
Tuliese had finished the bomb and was rolling the scaffolding away.

Their pilot, a first lieutenant named Gabriel, had arranged a photo session to promote crew
esprit de corps
and give everyone something to send home. Lewis was on his second tour and third crew and rarely tired of comparing the present group unfavorably to any other group in the ETO. On the way back from their first mission together he had angrily suggested changing the plane's name to
Chinese Fire Drill
, in honor of the overall coordination and performance of the ship's gunners.

Gabriel had a chart on which he'd figured the positioning for the photo, and he read it aloud: Kenneth A. Gabriel, Jr., pilot, Ellis Cooper, co-pilot, Willis Eddy, bombardier, Samuel Hirsch, navigator, standing, back row; Sebastian Piacenti and Lambert Ball, waist gunners, Harold Bean, radio operator, Robert Bryant, flight engineer, Gordon Snowberry, Jr., ball turret, and Lewis Peeters, tail gunner, kneeling, front row. While Gabriel read, they snickered at each other's names.

They lined up in that order and Bryant retrieved his shirt from the engine nacelle. Gabriel approved of their sloppiness in terms of the picture: it gave them that casual veterans' look.

He had talked another pilot, a guy named Charley Rice who flew
Boom Town
, into taking the picture. It was one of Rice's hobbies.

Rice had sauntered up while they were positioning themselves and had begun unfolding the camera tripod before them without comment.

“I figure you should frame it, Charley, so that you can see the name, too.” Gabriel pointed at the name behind him on the nose of the plane.

Rice did not answer. He was trying to affix the box camera onto the tripod. It was apparently an arduous task.

They were not used to all being together with nothing to do, officers and men, and they waited awkwardly. Lewis said, “Bean told someone—and I'm quoting now—that Snowberry here, to get into the ball, has to ‘curl into the fecal position.'”

“You've been reading my letters,” Bean said, shocked.

“In a what position?” Willis Eddy asked. His toe nosed Bean's bag of doughnuts.

“He meant fetal,” Gabriel explained. He made a circular motion with his hand, as if to hurry Rice's progress with the camera.

“I know that,” Willis Eddy said. “I thought it was funny.”

They waited and took special care with the kind of rumple they wanted to effect and calibrated their expressions and Rice still wasn't ready. He fumbled with a latch and sweated. Something gave a wicked snap and he seemed to have hurt a finger.

“That the right camera?” Lewis asked politely. “Some of those buggers are tricky.”

From his kneeling position Bryant surveyed the row of profiles on both sides of him with some pride, imagining his father or mother or Lois seeing it. He imagined his mother saying, “That's the plane they fly, behind them,” imagined his father grudgingly conceding that they looked like a pretty good bunch.

“
Paper Do
,” Rice said, squinting down into the viewfinder. “What's that mean, you suppose?” Gabriel colored and moved the lines slightly to the right, to avoid blocking the painted name. Rice took four pictures and everyone put in orders.

“This one's for Jean, from all of us,” Lewis said. They laughed. Jean was Snowberry's first girlfriend, a Brit from a nearby village, and she had dated a number of men on the base. Snowberry was sensitive about it. Lewis without his knowledge often compared her ability to say no to that of a particularly placid and acquiescent Red Cross doughnut girl known to all of them simply as Red Myrtle.

“Lewis,” Snowberry said.

“She's a fine girl,” Lewis said. “God knows.”

Piacenti had once asked Lewis at chow if he thought of Jean as that kind of girl. Lewis had said he thought of her as a farm animal.

As they were leaving, he said to Bryant, “I got a dog story for you. We had a dog, Skeezix, we were going to take him to be fixed, my dad and me. Bit the shit out of me while we were rounding him up. I didn't punish him or anything, figured what the hell. The next day we picked him up and he looks at me with these wide eyes like ‘Jesus Christ, this is the last time I fuck with you! Bite the guy's hand and he cuts your nuts off!'”

Bryant when he reflected on it later found the story haunting for the same reason Lewis found it funny: the notion of retribution out of all proportion.

He sat alone in the day room afterwards with some V-mail from Lois. As Nissen huts went, this one was larger and more dismal than most. He sat in a battered easy chair but the corrugated metal walls made the whole thing feel like a construction site. Higher up they were covered with pin-ups no one liked enough to steal, and the pictures were torn and dirty from constant pawing. There was a wooden table next to his easy chair with a lamp on it and a tray of ancient doughnuts. The undersides of the doughnuts were furred with mold.

The day room had been set up for the aircrews' leisure, and was looked upon by everyone as the nearest thing to a last resort. Bryant spread the letter before him and concentrated on an image of Lois, his high school girlfriend. He saw her on his parents' sofa, laughing at the radio. He reread the letter.

I guess it must seem strange to you sitting where you are reading this thinking about me and where I am. I'm on Fox near the water, where the railroad bridge goes over. It's a beautiful day tho it's been raining lots lately. The war seems very far away and very close at the same time. Everyone's very excited and pulling and praying for you. Your uncle Tom says you're probably an ace by now, and your father said he read about a guy who shot his foot off cleaning his guns. (Can you be an ace on a bomber?)

I'm glad you have a dog, because I think they're good company. Even if you have to share them. It's too bad that the dog can't see. I guess you're a Seeing-Eye person. Your father says he didn't know you could have dogs. I didn't tell him what you said about your friend taking a squirrel up in the plane with him because I don't believe you and that's that.

Lewis claimed that he had had a squirrel, Beezer, trained to eat out of his hands—the little son of a bitch would sit there like Arthur Treacher, he'd say—and that it had flown two lowlevel missions with him toward the end of his first tour. According to Lewis, at altitude the animal skittered all through the fuselage, its feet sounding like light hail on the aluminum. It showed up on the co-pilot's shoulder and nearly scared him to death. A rat! he'd screamed over the interphone. Jesus Christ, we got rats! He'd been reassured by the pilot and an amused bombardier that it was no rat, judging by the tail, but he'd cursed throughout the flight to the target that he'd wet himself because of the goddamned thing and that it was probably eating through the control cables right then, while he was talking. Ever see the teeth on those bastards? he kept saying. They were all sitting there laughing, he insisted over the interphone, and
pfffft
—right through the cables, and into the drink the hard way. They'd bombed some marshaling yards in Holland and Beezer had never been seen again.

Beezer, Lewis liked to theorize, had done a flying one and a half out of the bomb bay. Some Nazi manning an antiaircraft battery got it right in the face. He would mimic the plummeting Beezer, arms outspread, snarling. He speculated on the aerodynamics of the tail. He said, You think anyone's going to know what he did? We're talking about unsung heroes here.

So what's new?

There'a a young boy with the government that moved into the third floor of the Duffy's (very mysterious) and everyone's wondering what's up. All the girls are wild about him. But you don't have anything to worry about as you KNOW.

Everyone we talk to is thrilled when we say we have a boy in the service. The poor girls who don't are so left out. People say that's our part—find a boy, write him letters, maybe even get engaged. Mom says maybe they figure you'll fight even harder and do a better job if you've got someone in mind you're fighting for. How did I get on to that subject?

Bryant folded the letter and got up. He sighed, and went outside. Lewis was breaking plates over his head.

They made a curious and fragile wooden sound and separated easily into a rain of pieces, like clay pigeons. Snowberry was handing him plates from a tea service, and one by one he was breaking them over his head. Crockery pieces bounced and ticked off the pavement.

“Isn't it great?” Snowberry said. Bean and Piacenti were standing behind Lewis. “Lewis found all this stuff in the village. He got it all for nearly nothing. Some woman had lost her sons and was selling like everything she owned just right out in front of her house. Flipped. The neighbors were trying to talk her out of it and everything.” He gestured at a small heap of plates and teapots, cups and platters. Lewis broke another and a piece ricocheted a startling distance. It struck Bryant again how young Snowberry was: the same age as Lois's little brother. He had a fleeting image of Lois's brother in a B-17, like a boy allowed to sit in the gunner's seat at a country fair.

“What's it all worth?” he asked.

“Who knows?” Snowberry said. “You think they give away good china for peanuts around here?”

“Old hell-for-leather Bryant,” Lewis said. “He'd like to be a better gunner, but he knows what the bullets cost.”

“Hey, I'm just asking,” Bryant said. “You guys would piss on your mom's Sunday clothes.”

“With Mom still in them,” Lewis said. “She used to warn us about that.”

“They sure break good, though, don't they?” Piacenti said. “Whatever they're made of.”

“It's a funny gag,” Bryant said.

“He did it to me, too,” Bean said. “I thought he was gonna crack my skull.”

“I am gonna crack your skull,” Lewis said.

Bean shifted his weight uncomfortably from foot to foot. “I never know when he's kidding or not,” he complained. Bean seemed to want to believe that the natural order of things was harmony, that conflict came from misunderstanding. His father had run for selectman with the slogan
BEAN: I'TS LIKE BEING ELECTED YOURSELF.

“You gotta watch out, Bean,” Piacenti said. “He's out to get you.”

Bean nodded unhappily, half convinced.